


untamed and full of teeth

by cosmoscorpse



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, death battles for sport, offscreen and onscreen violence, poorly written fight scenes im so sorry, sorrow and woe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 10:58:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3848395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmoscorpse/pseuds/cosmoscorpse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can smell the aftershave that the man donned this morning in lieu of showering, can smell blood from five different bodies caked into his hands, under his fingernails (old man, young woman, child, child, child).</p><p>Matt’s going to rip his goddamn throat out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	untamed and full of teeth

_pain raved in me with a diabolical tongue_

_the body is a place of violence_ **  
**  


 

 

He takes inventory:

Broken leg (fibula, snapped cleanly - the leg might still hold his weight, if he can stand up), split lip, split skin over his cheekbone. His head aches. Probably a concussion. Some of the bones in his hand are probably crushed, considering the pain. Ribs definitely cracked. He feels nauseous. Might vomit.

He’s lying on his side, twisted up with his arms bound behind him. The floor under his cheek is bare concrete, cold and vaguely damp. It reeks of piss and blood and something violent and desperate. He blinks rapidly, trying to clear the fog from his head, straining to listen.

The room he’s in is small, maybe five foot by five foot, concrete, with one light bulb hissing and flickering in the ceiling. A stale half-breeze drifts up from a drain in the center of the floor, and he gags when he smells it.

He sucks in a harsh breath, expels it as a groan from behind gritted teeth. It’s tough to lever himself into a sitting position with his arms tied behind him, but he’s nothing if not tenacious. He props himself against the wall, breathing heavily. The metallic miasma of fresh blood floods the air as the scrape over his cheek starts bleeding again. He winces, feels the collar of his shirt growing damp.

It’s not just the room that stinks of blood and piss - the entire building (or at least the basement, judging from the echoes of sound) is ripe with it.

He can hear shouting nearby, intermingling with an animal sound that his spinning head can’t place. It sounds like football night, he thinks idly. Dozens of voices raised in the name of sports.

He breathes in, shifts his left leg delicately, listening for the break. It’s a clean one, thank God. He think it will hold him. It won’t be pretty, it’ll hurt like hell - but he’ll be able to stand. Good. He swallows, wills the nausea back down his throat, and cants his head.

The hallway outside the room is long and echoing, heartbeats spaced behind walls at semi-regular intervals. They’re all either unnaturally fast or slow. It sets him on edge, and he swallows, breathes sharply through his nose.

The distant roaring grows to a deafening crescendo that echoes painfully in his ears, rattles his bones. He winces, and his breath catches when he realizes that what he’s listening to is flesh tearing, rending from bone. The splinter-crack of the bones themselves shattering.

Dogs baying.

A cold pit settles in his stomach, and he holds himself very, very still. The lightbulb in the ceiling goes out with a hiss, the filament crackling.

He’s trying to remember how he got here and is drawing blanks. He thinks that he was at the gym, maybe, and then - nothing. A long stretch of yawning void. It’s probably the head wound he has to thank for that.

He shivers - the room is cold, and whoever took him also took his jacket and shoes. He shivers again, groaning when it jostles his broken everything.

A door clangs open in the hallway, and he snaps to attention, his head jerking up to the door of his room. The clamor of voices and barking dogs grows louder, but only for a moment before the door screeches shut again. Metal, and sturdy, he thinks, and then directs his attention at the person walking down the hall. Male, probably, and big too, with a loud heartbeat that’s quickened with some sort of excitement. He’s humming something that reminds him of a top 40s pop song, but the tune is nearly so mangled that its hard to pick it out, so he doesn’t bother trying.

He can smell the blood on the man’s shoes. Fresh.

The nausea rises again, and the man stops. Opens the door to the room next to his.

A high, thin voice whimpers “No.”

He is suddenly, viciously aware of how light the heartbeat in that room is, how breath catches and quickens in small lungs. How, under the rot and piss and shit stink, the body smells like all children do before they hit puberty. It’s a child in that room. A _child_.

He’s filled with an incandescent rage, shaking with it. He’s going to throw up.

The child screams and doesn’t stop. When the man picks them up they kick out and land a blow. The man grunts but doesn’t strike out in kind, merely hefting the child up and carrying them out of the little room, through the metal door.

Toward the dogs.

Matt leans over, his anger burning a hole in his chest.

Vomits.

Time passes - he’s not sure how much. His head still aches, fogging his senses, and he can’t latch onto anything that tell him anything specific. Still, if he had to guess, it’d be sometime during the day. His head aches, a dull throb clustered just behind his right ear. He can’t move the fingers of his injured hand, and moving the uninjured one sends unpleasant tingles shooting up into his shoulder. He’s tried shifting to relieve the pressure on his bound arms but had no luck.

His left leg has swollen up, too, but no more than he expected. Every now and then he’ll move it slightly just to see if he still can.

The humming man took three other people from the cells last night, lead them through the metal door. The dogs howled and howled and god, it sounded like the spectators were attending a sporting event. It was a sporting event. A caustic knot of rage and grief settled in Matt’s chest, listening to the violence. It hasn’t undone itself, still burning under his breastbone. His throat aches like he’s been screaming. He hasn’t been.

He almost wishes he had, though.

Of the four people led through the door last night, only one had come back out: the last, a woman, middle-aged, barefoot. She had been shaking and sobbing and her hands had been covered in human blood and the men carrying her at the elbows had been laughing and laughing, thrown her back into her room. They’d tossed something smaller in with her too, wrapped in paper and soaked in oil and stinking of cheap meat.

They’d given her a sandwich, as a sort of trophy.

Matt had yelled when they’d brought her back through - he would have hit something, if he was able, filled as he was (still is) with fury that he couldn’t do _anything_ but sit and wait - anyway, he knocked his head against the wall, hard enough to grey his everything out for a little while.

Now, surrounded by the relatively mundane sounds of warehouse-work going on above his head and the nauseating reek of death that he still hasn’t grown used to, he listens to the woman’s heartbeat. It’s stuttered into something slow and unspeakable. She ate the sandwich, then vomited it back up not long after. Matt can hear every hitch of her breath, every sob stifled by the palm of her hand. She hasn’t showered in over a week and the room is heavy with the smell of her body. There was one other in there with her, but the scent is a few days old. He doesn’t want to think about that.

He can’t (no matter how much he bashes his head against the wall) get her voice, her: “oh god, oh _god_ forgive me, I’m so sorry Dave, I’m so sorry, I’m so-” out of his head.

He can’t stop thinking about the sandwich. It’s not enough to be injured, he thinks wryly, to have his leg and hand broken - his tongue feels swollen in his mouth, his stomach twisting in on itself in hunger, sending twinges of pain through his belly.

The last time he ate; he tries to think. Before the gym, definitely. Maybe breakfast? A bagel? Some coffee? Anyway, not much, and at least a full day ago, maybe more. He’s not sure about the breakfast thing.

But still, he can deal with that. He can deal with all of it, the hunger, the thirst, the pain, because it’s not like he hasn’t dealt with anything like it before. No, the worst thing about this, the thing that twists his heart into a knot, is that he didn’t _know_ about any of it.

This place, this shithole - it’s well established. They’ve got a good gig going, whoever’s running the arena - a deal worked out with the warehouse on ground level, a way to catch fresh entertainment, a way to dispose of the old. It should have pinged, he should have heard something while on his nightly round, but there had been nothing. Not a single whisper.

He can’t stop thinking about the woman and how she survived, blood soaked and trembling, and how the four and many more before her had not. Matt can smell the evidence of their deaths caked into the very bricks of the place. He’s actually halfway glad he doesn’t have anything in his stomach.

He wonders, with a sort of morbid curiousity, what they do with the bodies, after.

He breathes sharply, grits his teeth, ignores the cramps in his stomach, and thinks: there are loads of places to disappear a corpse in New York City.

And see, here’s the thing: Matt is trying to be optimistic, but he’s not an idiot. He knows what his broken leg and concussion and this place all add up to.

He’s going to die here, but he’ll be damned if he makes it easy for them.

He tells himself that he’s not afraid, that he has never been afraid to make this last, terrible journey (but he is, he is).

 

He’s the first to be pulled through the metal door that evening.

He was right to liken it to a sporting event. It sounds almost exactly like Josie’s when a big game's on and he and Foggy manage to wander in: voices shouting, howling, chattering over each other. Matt can barely hear himself think, so when he stumbles over a crack in the concrete floor, it’s only halfway fabricated. The wince is real.

Everything else, though, his frightened face, his trembling shoulders - a show.

He was right about his leg, and being able to stand on it. Of course, he doesn’t let anyone else know that. If this is going to work even once, they need to think he’s weak, an easy target, so he limps. Heavily. Allows himself to be mainly dragged around by a hand in a vicegrip around his bicep, tight enough to bruise. He keeps his face turned down, focuses on the pull and drag of his bare toes on the concrete.

He listens past the frantic, bloodthirsty heartbeats, blocks out the scent of blood and booze and drugs and unwashed human bodies, and pictures the room.

It’s very bare, spare light fixtures hanging at intervals from the ceiling, raw concrete power scrubbed recently. There are wire cages against the far wall and Matt can smell that they held dogs not long ago, but they’re empty now. In the far corner of the room the sound echoes oddly due to the sunken pit occupying it: this is the arena, this is the ring.

Matt can smell the blood crusted into the drain, just like the one in the cell. He hears the chainlink fence around the edges of the pit rattling as bodies press against it.

The man wrenches his arm and he does cry out, because the movement is unexpected and painful. He’s shoved through an opening in the fence, stumbles to his knees in the center of the pit, and breathes heavily. The crowd’s volume rises in a raucous cheer.

He breathes sharply through his nose, and freezes. Behind the fence, at his left and back a bit, is a man who stinks of clove and peppermint. The scent stirs a memory, dim and impressionistic, of when he was taken.

This man with the slow and steady heartbeat, a cigar in his fingers and oil carded into his hair, was the one who broke his leg and crushed his hand.

He’s not given time to ruminate on this train of thought - a new body steps into the ring alongside the man who took him from his cell. Matt shifts subtly on his knees. His hands are still bound behind his back, and this all banks on the assumption that they’ll cut him loose. He breathes lightly, gently flexing his fingers. The movement brings a slight dampness to his eyes, and he thinks, _perfect_ , and turns his face up to the wild crowd, makes his lips tremble.

The first man steps toward him, roots around in his pants pocket before pulling out a blade. He steps behind Matt and before he can tense, the man slices his wrists free. It takes a moment for the blood to rush back through his stiff shoulders into his numb fingertips and when it does he doubles over, gasping. It hurts, and he swallows, bracing himself against the floor with his good hand.

He doesn’t attempt to mask the trembling in his limbs, even keeps it going long after it would have stopped, normally. This perceived weakness quickens the heartbeat of the second man in the ring, the one who is going to try to beat him to death, into something predatory. He reeks of adrenaline and excitement.

The man who unbound his wrists leaves the ring. He’s alone now with the other one, people screaming murder at him through the fence. He tunes them out, or tries to, focuses on the man’s heartbeat as he circles.

“Get up,” he growls, lunging forward. Matt waits until he lays a hand on his shoulder before cringing back, wincing into the concrete. “Stand up!”

Matt forces a choked sob out of his chest, gasps out a stuttered, “I-I’m sorry, I- my leg is broken, pl-please-”

The crowd boos. The man huffs in frustration, waves to someone in the spectators. “Get him a stick or something to lean on, I won’t fight him if he can’t stand up,” he shouts. Matt holds his body still, and waits, listening past the howling crowd. Something wooden changes hands at the fence, where its tossed through to land with a clatter near Matt’s hand.

The man kicks him in the ribs, yells, “Get the hell up!”

Matt takes the staff in hand, feeling over it quickly. It’s tall, and sturdy, and it will work. He forces down a grin, braces the staff against the floor, and makes a show of hauling himself to his feet.

“ _Knock his goddamn head off!_ ” someone is the crowd screams, and Matt ducks his face, smiles, takes it as a command.

He leans hard on the staff, forcing his breath into a rough, dazed gasping. Keeps his face vacant, maybe a bit fearful, plays at being weak. The man in the ring with him - a tall bastard with breath that whistles through his front teeth - circles like he has been. He think’s toying with the blind man, thinks this will be _easy_ , that Matt will go down without a fight (he won’t go down at all, not at his hands). Matt can smell the aftershave that he donned this morning in lieu of showering, can smell blood from five different bodies caked into his hands, under his fingernails (old man, young woman, child, child, child).

Matt’s going to rip his goddamn throat out.

His heart beats fast in his chest, and he narrows the focus of his senses to him, the tall man, and the ring. He lets his fingers shake, his lips quiver, his sightless eyes cast upward in a supplication to god. A show. He’s waiting. Listening.

He hears the skip in the man’s heartbeat a moment before he roars and lunges forward. He meets the wild punch with a sidestep, feels the air brush past his cheek, and steels himself.

He rams the butt of the staff up under the man’s chin, making his teeth clack together violently, like clattering, shattering porcelain. He yells, reels, and spits a shard of tooth onto the ground, but Matt doesn’t wait for him to recover from his daze: he brings the staff down in a wide arc, smacking hard across his shoulder blades. It cracks a rib (he can hear the crackle) and knocks the air from the guy’s lungs, a rough hiss of escaping gas.

Matt listens, and feels something bright and sharp and familiar blooming in his gut. He steps back. Lets the devil out.

The man says, “What the _fuck_ ,” and Matt grins, brilliant and feral. He hits him again, first on the upswing, feels the wood in his hand tremble with the force of the blow that breaks two more of the guys ribs, then once more on the downswing, breaking his arm. While the man is doubled over, coughing at the concrete floor, he braces himself on his good leg and the staff and brings the knee of his injured leg up into the man’s face.

The movement sends a jolt of pain up his leg, but that’s okay. It’s good, it keeps him focused. The cartilage in the man’s nose crunches fantastically, and he groans, spits up a globule of blood.

Matt snarls and sweeps the staff, aiming for the back of the man’s legs, toppling his already unstable body to the ground. His head smacks against the concrete, cracks. Matt can smell the blood, hears the heartbeat slow into the dull thrum of unconsciousness.

The fight is over in less than two minutes. It takes a moment for Matt’s senses to clear from the adrenaline-fog. He’s breathing heavily, and shaking. He might have pushed himself further than he should have, maybe he shouldn’t have been petty and broken the guy’s nose with his knee - but to do otherwise would have been unthinkable. He leans on the staff, tastes the iron in the air.

The spectators are silent, eerily so compared to their previous volume. Matt tastes fresh blood in his mouth, wonders when he bit his cheek. He turns to face them, and spits.

It’s that action that triggers the crowd back into sound and motion. They rage against the fence, shouting and screaming and spitting, an intermingling of “What the fuck?” and “Ho-ly shit!” and “Jesus Christ!”

Matt spreads his arm out, bows to them, lets the sound crash over him.

It doesn’t take long at all for two more men, shorter but burlier than the last, to barrel through the opening in the chain link and take positions opposing him. Matt grins, feels blood on his teeth, hears their heartbeats quicken. They’re untrained, their movements heavy and nervous, easy to predict.

The surge forward and Matt slips away, darting around them. It’s harder than the first - of course it is, he’s still injured and winded and now there are two of them - but he’s also fought worse fights than this.

He dispatches the first of the two with a blow to the larynx and then the temple, and the second gets a hit on his ribs that hurts like a bitch (he screams, he does, and the crowd goes mad with the sound of it, their heartbeats and voices rising in riotous sound). That’s all he gets, though, before Matt cracks his kneecap with the staff then smacks him across the forehead with it. The splintering of bone and skin rings in his ears.

It’s over and he’s gasping, actually leaning on the staff now, instead of merely using it for show. His head throbs, his chest stings with every breath. His senses are swimming in a sea of iron and sweat and he’s tired, he’s hungry, and he wants this to be over but there’s only one way this ends, and he’s not done yet.

(He can smell the blood, still, the older stuff caked into the concrete so deeply that no powerscrub could lift it out and away, that tell him the lives of all the people who died here - old people, young people, sick people, healthy people, people from all walks of life disappeared from the streets only to wind up here and be snuffed and Matt is sick with anger, his bones ache for retribution in the only way he knows how)

The spectators are screaming, howling, flinging insults. They want his blood spilled in the ring with all those who came before him. He closes his eyes, sways, feels the cadence of all the thrumming heartbeats, all the people here complicit in the violence. (He hates them all. He hates-)

A fourth man enters the ring. He’s tall and broad, built like an ox, his heartbeat loud and steady. Matt turns, steels himself.

The man doesn’t lunge forward immediately, and they circle each other at a wary distance. Matt can tell, immediately, that this man is different from the rest. He’s trained, he knows what he’s doing, how best to structure his attack. Matt feels despair rising in his throat, pushes it down with a growl. He tightens his grip on his staff, grits his teeth against the grind of bone in his leg. He knows it won’t hold him for much longer, but he doesn’t let himself think that. He shuts out all the outside stimulus as best as he can, the shouting of the crowd fading into a persistent itch at the base of his skull, the pain in his body that’s nearly driving him out of his mind diminishing to a dull, pulsing reminder of his time limit.

Matt makes the first move, darting forward with a hoarse shout to jab at the man’s ribs. He sidesteps it easily, and Matt pulls back immediately.

The fight moves quickly, the two of them trading punches and kicks and swipes of a staff that either hit, or don’t. Matt’s face is bleeding, again, and his shoulder aches fiercely where the man managed to land a blow. In turn, he takes vicious pride in hearing the man’s ribs grate against each other in his chest.

It happens too suddenly for Matt to react: the man darts forward, stomps hard on his bare left foot. Matt howls, hears the bones crunch. The man drives an elbow into his shoulder. He hears the crack in his collarbone just before a flare of white-hot pain lances down his arm, spasming his hand.

He lets go of the staff. The man snatches it and drives it at his injured leg.

Matt screams, falls, and just like that, Matt’s on his knees.

They’re both breathing heavily, both injured, but he’s at a clear disadvantage, being doubled over as he is on the floor. Matt can’t tell if the crowd’s gone silent, or if he’s still blocking them out. He’s exhausted, so really, it could be either. His hearing’s kind of flickering in and out anyway. The man’s heartbeat jumps, his arm creaks and the air whistles when the staff cuts through it.

The blow lands hard on his shoulders and he gasps. Another lands on the back of his head. His mouth opens, floundering as starbursts flash in his brain. He tips forward, falls.

The concrete is warm and rough under his fingertips. If he pulls his thoughts together enough he almost thinks he can hear things from beyond the ring, beyond the room. The city.

The man tosses the staff into the corner of the ring. _It’s over_ , Matt realizes as it clatters. A sort of serenity settles over him, dulling the hurt.

(He doesn’t want to die, of course he doesn’t want to die. But, he thinks, it would be nice to rest? Just for a little bit. He hopes Foggy and Karen won’t be too upset when they find out what happened to him, if they ever do, even though he knows they will be. Of course they will be.

He misses them. Wishes selfishly, always selfishly, that they were here with him.)

Through the fog, he hears, “Hey, Jim, give me that knife,” and can’t even summon the energy to move more than a weak twitch from his position. He closes his eyes.

He fades for a moment, comes back with a rough hand in his hair, hauling him back up to his knees from his slumped position. He doesn’t bother opening his eyes, because even that sounds taxing beyond reason, and it’s not like it would make a difference anyway. He feels the kiss of cold steel against his throat.

And then, in the moment before the digging in and the dragging, he hears something tangible:

The heartbeat of a man in the crowd jumps in a fit of nervousness, not excitement. Then, a muffled radio, beyond the metal door, police jargon chattering through the fuzzy speakers. The hushed whisper of tactical gear, and a dozen strong, steady heartbeats in the hallway, waiting. He almost doesn’t believe it, then hears a crackling ‘ _go get them, boys_ ,’ hears a dozen heartbeats pick up pace in response to this order. Hears soft, precise rustling on the other side of the door, buttons being pressed. A quiet trilling. He recognizes the sound, vaguely, as that of a charge being set.

He opens his eyes, a burst of adrenaline rushing through his body, cutting away the mist that had settled over his limbs. In a heartbeat he reaches up, pushes away the arm holding the knife to his throat, senses flaring white-hot in a burst of pain-fueled panic as he scrambles away from the man as quickly and viciously as he can. In the same heartbeat, SWAT detonates the charge on the other side of the awful metal door and they swarm the room, shouting and spreading through the crowd.

Matt’s ears are ringing, his head aches with the sound of it all: the screaming, both on parts of the crowd and the police. The air is full of noise and frantic heartbeats. It takes him a moment to pull himself together.

Matt’s sprawled on the floor, pressed flat into the concrete. He feels like he’s going to cry, or throw up. Maybe both - his face feels hot and stiff. Mostly he’s just cold and aching, though - once he’s heard the man in the ring with him exit through the chainlink while roaring some sort of stupid battlecry (he falls a second later, felled by a bullet from a gun held by a short, nervous cop, and Matt tries to feel bad about that, he does) - he tries to push himself into a sitting position.

The world tilts, dips. Matt finds himself sprawled on his stomach instead of his back, blinking and frowning, his face pressed into the rough concrete. There’s something warm and wet sliding down his neck, soaking into his shirt collar. His bad arm is twisted up under his chest. He groans in the ground, lifts his good hand up, probing.

He feels the hot pulse of fresh blood on his fingertips.

 _Oh_ , he thinks, and remembers the sharp flash of pain that’s he’d almost forgotten about when he’d pushed away from the man. He laughs, and it chokes off into a groan.

Matt forces his unwilling body onto his side, wraps the clumsy fingers of his bad hand over the little-but-deep wound in his neck. He holds the bad hand in place with his good hand, tries to will his heartbeat into something slower, something safer. The blood is thick and viscous, hot and reeking of iron and it is everywhere, on his front on the ground slipping through the gaps in his shaking fingers.

The world is spinning, and the wound doesn’t hurt very much. He should maybe be more worried about that than he is, but everything’s fading, sinking into a dull, dark whisper.

**  
**  


 

‘ _Hey, over here_ ,’ the voice cuts through the murk, barely. ‘ _Look_.’

‘ _Is he dead?_ ’

A pause. ‘ _No._ _Shit. No. Hey, I’ve got a wounded vic over here! Get the medics in here stat!_ ’

Somebody kneels at his side, warm. They remove his hands from his throat and he whimpers, feel the blood slide hot and fresh over his front, puddling under his cheek.

‘ _Shit_ ,’ the voice says again, and strong hands replace his own on his throat.

His eyes roll in his head, and everything goes silent.

**  
**  


 

“Hey, hey, easy,” the voice says, warm and familiar. This doesn’t process immediately, and Matt gasps, pushes against the hand settled gentle and firm on his chest. The silence of the room is loud in his ears, oppressive. The hand remains firm against his weak struggles, the voice continues placatingly, softly, a hand carding through his hair.. “Shh, shh. It’s alright. You’re alright.”

Eventually, he stills, breathing sharply, and forces his mind into some semblance of calm. His tongue darts out over dry lips, and he swallows. Listens carefully as sounds filter back through his head - it’s not as quiet as he thought, quiet and safe city sounds filtering through old stone walls.

He breathes in deeply, relaxes when he smells home, hears the heartbeat of the man sitting next to him.

He curls a hand possessively around the man’s wrist, whispers, “F’ggy,” through lips that feel numb and thick, though even as he says it it’s getting better, his head is clearing. “Foggy,” he says again.

Foggy laughs, a choked sound. “Yeah. Yeah, Matt, I’m here,” he says, laying his other hand over Matt’s. Matt revels in the touch. Frankly, he’s amazed he’s alive. Eventually, he blinks slowly, turns his head and grunts in pain when the movement pulls something. He extricates his hand to reach up to his neck, but Foggy holds him in place.

“You’re not supposed to pick on that,” he says, admonishing. “Chill out, or you’ll pop your stitches.”

“Sorry,” Matt says. “Why’m I not at the hospital?” It’s not that he doesn’t mind, exactly, because he hates hospitals, but it’s becoming increasingly clear (stitches in his wounds, a cast on his leg and arm) that he was there at some point in the not-so distant past. “What happened.”

He remembers the fighting ring, the SWAT team, blood leaking from between his fingers. He had been sure that he was dead, but it obviously didn’t stick.

Matt can’t think too long about all of that, though. It’s too fresh and too visceral, so instead he focuses on the heavy, steady thrum of Foggy’s heartbeat.

“They found you when they raided that warehouse on Saturday - some employee was in the know, I guess, about that bullshit they were running there, and he grew a moral compass and told the police,” Foggy says, his voice carefully toneless. Matt can hear the emotion running an undercurrent through it, though. He swallows. “I got a call from the hospital saying- Well, anyway. They put you in a medically induced coma and said that they were sure you’d make a full recovery, but they wanted to keep you under observation for a few days. So they did.

“They released you on Wednesday, and Karen and I thought it would be better for you if you woke up at home. We pulled some strings and...” There’s a rustle of fabric, probably Foggy gesturing broadly at the surroundings. Matt swallows again, past the thickness in his throat. He can practically taste Foggy’s exhaustion and fear tainting the air. It makes him sick to know he’s the cause. “You really scared us, Matt,” Foggy adds quietly.

Matt nods once, carefully. “I’m sorry,” he says. Foggy sighs, drags a hand over his face.

“Listen, Matt. I just. We were really, really worried. I was really worried. About you. I’m not, just. Please check in with me before you go off Daredevilling? Even if you think you can get yourself out of it, and especially if you think it’s going to be dangerous,” he trails off and Matt is frozen, his fingers caught, tangled up in his sheets.

He thinks, _I wasn’t, I didn’t mean for it to happen, I didn’t plan any of this_. He makes a soft, strangled noise in his throat, and the pressure breaks free as a quiet, desperate, “Foggy, I was at the gym.”

Foggy stills. “What?”

His throat feels like its going to seal itself like a tomb, but he needs him to know that Matt didn’t intend for any of this to happen, that for once in his life he had not gone looking for trouble but it had found him anyway.

“I didn’t. I wasn’t-” he makes a face, repeats the word Foggy used earlier, “Daredevilling. I- they jumped me when I was coming home from the gym. I wasn’t trying to.”

He stops talking. Foggy hasn’t moved or spoken.

Eventually, he drags in a shaking breath. Matt hears him run his hands through his hair, can smell the tears welling in Foggy’s eyes. His heart feels like it’s breaking.

“God, Matt,” Foggy begins, and stops. “Alright. Alright. But you’ll still be more careful, and you’ll still let me know if you think you’ll run into trouble?”

Matt nods. Unspoken between them is the acknowledgement that cases like this: casual, vicious reminders that the city is still not safe and might never be safe, is exactly the reason why Matt does what he does. His work will never be done.

Matt swallows, feels the motion pull at the stitches in his throat, thinks _I almost died_ and then buries it deep.

(Wonders why that thought felt like disappointment, then buries it deeper.)

“Where’s Karen?” he asks.

“She left to get takeout a half hour ago. She should be back in a few minutes,” Foggy says, maybe reading something on Matt’s face that gentles his voice.

Matt nods once more, “Good,” he says, and closes his eyes.

He listens to Foggy’s heartbeat, trying to match it to his own, and together they wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Trivia: the italic bits at the top are two lines from two different poems
> 
> written for this prompt (http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=33493#cmt33493). this is baby's first time ever writing for the fandom or a kinkmeme, i'm so sorry
> 
> thank you for reading UuU if you notice any errors please let me know


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